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Water

A Biography

By: Giulio Boccaletti

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Paperback | 18 October 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
400 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.6 x 15.6 x 2.5

Paperback

RRP $45.00

$37.75

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Spanning millennia and continents, a stunning, revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization

Spanning millennia and continents, a revealing history that "tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity" (Kelly McEvers, NPR Host).

"Far more than a biography of its nominal subject ... The book stands as a compelling history of civilization itself."-The Wall Street Journal Book Review

Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boc-caletti-honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer-sity of Oxford-shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ-ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.

We see with clarity how irrigation's structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure.

Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to-and fundamental reliance on-the most elemental substance on earth.

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